Noctua Ideas | Micah Neal

Text Editor Taste Test

There is nothing more personal to a coder than their choice in text editor. Long ago I used notepad to make simple things, but I hated it, it gave no indication if what I was doing was right or wrong and was difficult to read any type of complex code. Every now and then I find myself still using it to make a quick change to a Windows / WAMP setting, and have flashbacks to the trauma of having no other text editor.

Later I found Notepad++, it was worlds better than notepad! I could better see and understand the code. I could make whole projects with ease. I was no longer in the Dark Ages it felt like.

Curiosity got a hold of me after reading a blog article about what other text editors might be out there…I found Sublime and it was drastically better than Notepad++, but it had for me at the time a large price tag associated with it (I feel guilty abouy using evaluation software for very long).

Then I discovered Atom, I remember giggling with delight at how easy Atom was for me to use. The interface, colors, and fonts, feel just right to me. I feel I can keep myself very well organized with it.

When I was working for a local company I found myself using PhpStorm, the existing website that was so huge and had so many different paradigms of organization that I needed something like phpStorm to help me grapple with the large code base and map out the variables that I needed to work with. I would sometimes hear other programmers say that our code base provided “security through obscurity”, and I never worked out if they were joking or not…

Recently I’ve discovered Brackets, and it’s live-preview in Chrome and ease of altering CSS attributes make it a solid choice for prototyping a website, and I plan to use it as such, however Atom will still be my go to for anything more complex than HTML and CSS.

From trying the different editors I’ve realized that all of them pretty much do the same thing and which one is right for you is a matter of taste, kinda like Coke vs. Pepsi.